


A Strange Hunt

by rednightmare



Series: Below the Storm [1]
Category: Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Animal Death, Battlefield Violence, Character Study, Dismemberment, Drama, F/F, F/M, Grief, Intense feels, M/M, Mild Blood, Murder, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, One Shot Collection, Sex Work, Sexual Content, Shitty Historical Attitudes about Civil Rights, Suicide Attempt, What-If, also mild blood kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-03-31 20:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13982742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: In a storm, I think, 'What if the gospel be not true?’ – John WesleyHal, Hans, and Theresa—chasing ghosts who cannot love them back. Connected character pieces.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _A Strange Hunt_ is a three-act dramatic study with one installment for each character: Theresa, Hans, and Henry. This is a Beauty and Terror piece. I have endeavored to handle all violence sensitively and sparsely, without glorification or HBO-style splatterpunk. Specific content warnings re: major violence will be available at the beginning of each chapter.
> 
>  **CHAPTER ONE WARNINGS** : Canonical non-graphic rape occurs in this chapter, as well as battlefield violence (such as dismemberment, murder, arson, etc). The description is intentionally minimal, but it is still upsetting. If you would like to skip this entire section, it begins: “The wheat burns.” It ends: “Her brothers are no longer here.”

There is bee honey growing in the linden tree, but Theresa has always had a taste for plums.

They are rocky red plums, the ones that grow half-wild beyond her brothers’ mill in Skalitz. Tart, dense little fists the size of walnuts; they’ve a sweet bite hidden in the skin that will surprise you. For a while, she was intent on learning to jar, but the pitting and jamming robbed them, somehow, of their specialness. Wild plums are better eaten wild.

It’s a short season, lasting only a gasp of these long sun-showered summers, and there is more fruit than Theresa can stomach. (Though she tries; oh, she tries). Subsumed by bounty, she looks for ways to turn her excess of plums into kindness. It is more difficult than you'd think. The three boys complain of numb tongues and are no help at home. Johanka is allergic, or professes to be. Matthew and Fritz make sour faces. Martin, the blacksmith, claims his wife cooked her basket of rosy millhouse fruit into a delicious pie—but he is an uncommonly gracious man—and, Theresa suspects, he may be a bit of a gracious liar, too.

It is her curse, of sorts. No matter how much Theresa gives away, there are always portions left behind.

In June—when the warm winds of the Atlantic wake the yellow grass upside the hills, and the spring wedding snowmelts have greened spruces and pinked dogwoods, and the midnight teardrops shiver open on butterwort stems—dancing begins in Skalitz. Lanterns of red and gold paper are strung from the tradehouse awning to the tavern roof, dice tables are pushed aside, daymarket tents are unpitched, and the people spin into night air whorls of dry dirt that smells of ale and horses. When they're lucky, a vagabond bard will stop and charm out the whole town on fiddle or harp. Other evenings, they play alone, Skalitz—they take their joy from amateur music, to Zbyshek’s reed flute and Antonia’s copper pot drums. If Agnes will not lay aside her hymnals to sing nicely, they all warble and clap together. They gambol late, and they eat early, and before the sun is rising, the last twirlers and stompers are abed with bellies full of chestnut twists and watered beer.

Theresa never was much for dancing. Her feet are small and her knees are stiff and her breasts are heavy; when she hops, it feels morbid and sloppy with shame. She feels like a keg of peeled, undersweet plums in a day dress. It is no way to be young. She does, however, enjoy dances. The candles wear halos against the stirred dust, and curled ribbons bounce in free hair, and the rain-washed stars snicker. It is special magic, even if it’s the sort you schedule. There is really nothing like watching the butcher and barmaids and bailiff all show their teeth and together howl down the moon.

 _“They’ll drink me out of house and home,”_ Bianca swears, cursing with whispy breath and sweaty neck as she rolls another barrel into the daylit square. Skalitz's merrymakers will have drunk it all by tomorrow’s dance. She only pretends to mind. _“But who am I to stand between a bunch of thirsty calves and mother’s milk?”_

Theresa watches Bianca work, sometimes, when the mill days are slow and idle and there’s nothing better to do than wander to market for apricots and puffed pretzels. She is immediate and impossible not to see. Reds are her favorite, and Theresa can often spot a rose dress walking uproad to the tavern in early morning, cutting softly through tall wormwood and wild carrot. She lifts her hand to wave.

They cannot see each other’s faces against the shadowy pinks of dawn. But she hopes they both smile with their hands reaching towards the new sun.

She could have been more, Bianca. She could have, if she wanted. And if the weather were a little different in this world.

 

* * *

 

When they are small, and their lives are cottonseed on a rambling breeze, Theresa and Bianca go wading. They heel off their boots (for Skalitz shoes its children), tie up their skirts, and slip along the shallow creeks that carve grass fields and clover pastures. They race carefully, mindful not to break their ankles after watching Johanka snap hers and lie abed for a whole summer. They swipe into clusters of tiny minnows like kittens, giggling as fish bodies flash through their fingers, escaping into forests of reeds. They see who can toss rocks the farthest. They mark their victories with miniature towers of red clay stones.

They do not play too deep. Theresa cannot swim.

“What will you do,” she wonders, sloshing to the bank, dragging wet hair scraggle from her eyes. Bianca has just tripped her to win a race, but it’s silly-fun, and doesn’t matter; Bianca could push Theresa anywhere, even then, and she’d not mind. Especially then, when they have ten years, eggyolk fresh, and the world seems like it might still be full of thrilling storms. “When you’re too old to do this?”

She snorts when the miller’s daughter (for she still was someone’s daughter, then) plops down beside her to rest. The current drags against their toes, and the afternoon sun is climbing down from its highest rampart, foot-after-foot. “Playing in the river. Why would I ever be too old for this?” She squints, and flicks a palmful of droplets that make her playmate wince happily. “Same thing you’ll be doing, I suspect.”

“You’re older than me.”

“By a year. That’s not older.”

“Fine, then,” Theresa relents. Her shoulders are sore, and the bank squishes beneath her handheels. A lost brown cow hoofs confidently in the distance, pulling mouthfuls of wild onion; they see it, sometimes, moving among deer thickets with neither destination nor bell. “What will _we_ do?”

“Oh, probably get married. And boring. And old.”

Theresa smiles—a crackling, skeptical smile—but it makes her sick to think so. A strange, headwind sickness. She imagines Bianca, black-eyed and wild-maned, belly swollen up with rocks. “Don’t say that. You won’t.”

“Sure I will. What else am I going to do in Skalitz, Theresa. And you will, too. Besides, don’t you like Hal?” Theresa makes a gagging face. “No? Matthew, then? Fritz?”

“Fritz is a gourd."

She chuckles. “No arguments there. But what about Hal?”

“Hal—” Theresa decides, watching the far-off cow lope off through punishing tangle of wild roses, vanishing, not certain to return. “—is a pumpkin.”

“Hah! That’s true. And Matthias has got a turnip for a head. We’ll have a whole vegetable family,” Bianca figures, laughing in earnest now, her breath scattering over the slick uneven sandstone and whisking away, following the animals that went astray. “Three-bean sons, a cucumber for a daughter, and who—me? Of course. A big boiled beet of a wife.”

“You won’t,” Theresa swears, quietly, and reaches out to squeeze her hand so tight the knuckles roll together beneath damp sunwarm skin.

Bianca thinks about it. Bianca, chuffing, picks a grassblade off Theresa’s scalp and throws it into the ripples. “What will I do, then, if you’re so certain about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe become a bandit.”

“Get gone, you!"

Theresa does not get-gone. “You’d make a perfect bandit,” she’s sure, dissolving the pale painting of Bianca, burdened, sinking in deep water—surfacing with colors that are living, shivering, like gems panned up from the bottom of a lake. “You’ll have a black horse and a cutlass and a hat with a feather in it. And you’ll ride through the forest, outsmarting rich travelers and stealing from caravans. Of course, you’ll have to fight, sometimes. But you’ll win. Then you’ll tie up your prisoners. You’ll set the servants free, and you’ll ransom the nobles. And if they don’t pay, you’ll take every past coin off them. You’ll turn them out into the woods naked, and sell all their fine jewelry and silks.”

“And what will you do,” Bianca wonders, bemused, shaking watercurls free from behind her ears, “while I’m stripping all these nobles?”

She hasn’t thought about it, really. But the answer is there under the tip of her tongue, like a tree nut that had been secreted there all along. “I’ll be your squire.”

“Bandits don’t have squires, toad.”

“Well, no. But you will,” Theresa promises. They sit with their arms interlocked until evening. The river runs harmless over their feet.

You will.

 

* * *

 

This year, it isn’t quite July when the plums begin darkening. Theresa eyes them anxiously, anticipating the first to fall and split like a pent breath. In end, she cannot wait. A woman grown, she yet has weedy-strong mill-child arms married to scrappy sprinter’s legs, and so she climbs the tree, flinging the ripest fruit into a canvas sack to carry overshoulder. They ooze just a little sour-sweet and make the bees follow her all the way home.

Henry comes by that afternoon to deliver a box of nails, and Theresa is sitting outside the house, wiping her harvest clean in a handful of apron and letting the draw well cobbles warm her shoulders.

He waves distractedly at her with that flip-flop lazy arm of his, looking for Georgei or Milosh, but the former is in town buying onions and the latter has resigned early to bed with a stomachache from last night’s frolic. Little Jarik hasn’t yet returned from the mine. So it is Theresa who reaches out for the delivery, palm-up, noticing only now that purple juice has stained her fingers. And Henry walks to her, instead—ambling and long-legged blacksmith’s son, not precisely unhandsome, but maybe a little dopey. He slips around the gate her brothers built and makes his way over their scythe-cut front yard to the well. His messy chop of hair is yellower than hers; it looks like late season wheat. Hers is more like creekwater, brown-bedded, owning just a fishtail of sun. He is older, but not by much. It’s only a summer or two.

Theresa doesn’t dislike Henry. He is a gentle boy, and she admires his father a good deal, and he is very good to Bianca. And for her. Last October, she stitched him a scarf of her own special red, a cut cloth he wears with the religion of a templar. Oh, he hems and haws like boys do about such things, but it doesn’t matter. Theresa is positive they will be betrothed before the year is out.

She doesn’t dislike Henry; she only finds him a little simple.

“Hi, Treesa—what? Are you bleeding?” he demands, slack sing-song tightening, last few steps picking up speed. Theresa looks down at her stained palm and gives it a healthy waggle.

“No! Not purple. Here.” She opens the satchel and lets him peek in. “Have a look.”

Henry has one. Her plums are tidy now; the stray leaves have been plucked and the smashed ones have been disposed of, tossed afield for rabbits and does. All the same, this smith’s son makes a face. The finger-shake he deals her belongs on an old man, but comes so naturally to him it makes Theresa snicker.  “Now, you’ll spoil your supper!”

“As if I’m going to eat them all myself, you clod. I’d be sick for days.”

“Or stuffed. Like a pheasant.”                                   

“Hah. More like a pig.”

“Or a quail.”

“Or a goat.”

“Or a trout!”

She doesn’t want to laugh at any more of a blacksmith’s jokes, but does, anyway. It is difficult not to give Henry that. He is harmless; he is the grasshopper fiddling autumn away. He does not start any fights. His eyes aren’t quite blue; they’re too pervaded by green; but they are bluer than hers.

“Let me have the nails,” Theresa says. She takes them. The box is warm, splintery cedar. She pins it safely under an arm.

She should not so compare—envy is a root sin, one that gnarls into demon’s fingers, flailing in the sun—and she does not feel badly over Henry, truly. Henry, who ambles along in his bean-green clothing, moseying in and out of boredom, as mellow a friend as she has ever seen. Henry, who wouldn’t chase a cat or hurt a fly. Yet she catches a glimpse of her harder nose and her thinner mouth in his almost-blue eye and she cannot help but place herself beside him, hoping she will be more of something than he. Than anything.

It is a dance night tonight. On a dance night, Bianca does not seem to smile so much as she radiates in red. She pours everyone’s first cup free. Sometimes—if you are her friend, and if you’ve been good—she’ll dash your coins and keep your spirits flowing into sunrise.

For Theresa’s part, she does little to help prepare. There are few jobs for a miller in the school of jubilation, and raw flour is no good to anyone as-is. It is changed too easily by water and wind.

She asks: “Are you going to the dance this evening?”

“I am.” He thinks it an odd question, a given, and it is. 

“Do you suppose there will be a big crowd this time? Bigger than last night.”

Henry stands there regarding her with his hands on his hips like they are about to start building a table, loading a ship, or molding a sword. His face is lamblike with long lashes, and he reminds her at once of a grandfather and a child of about ten. (Theresa is fair sure she looks like nothing else but a daywork-freckled woman of her age.) “How’ll I know?” he wonders, and she twists her hands in her apron, leaving juice prints like crushed violet. There are field burrs clutching her rough dress and dirt on her shoes and she knows the flour smell will never come out. “How big could it get? Skalitz is Skalitz, isn’t it.”

“Well, I was thinking. Do you suppose, if I brought a few bags to her, Bianca could use these to brew something? She’s always cooking up wild recipes. And I know the Talmberg road has been a sight more dangerous than usual, so the trade wagons haven’t—”

“Ah, now—there’s a thought. She might. You’re a peach, Treesa. Or a plum. Give here,” he beckons, reaching out the way people gesture for mothers to pass over a babe. “I’ll take the sack up to her.”

Theresa should not think of Henry so. She shouldn’t. She tightens both arms around the satchel and feels her fruit pained beneath the weight. “Oh. But—you really don’t have to. I was going to bring them over in the—”

“No, no. I’ve got it. Knight Errant Henry, gallantly at your lugging service.”

Then he is taking it from her, swinging precious bulk over one shoulder, and she has nothing to do but surrender. Guarded wishes dethread in midair. In that moment, Theresa is squeezing her heart in her fist, and it is pulpy, and smooth, and dark. Then she looks, and sees the encased heaviness is only a stray plum, after all.

She is a little simple, too.

Hal, she says. She barks after his back before it leaves her there, fruitless. Henry, wait.

He does. Theresa has stiffened to her feet without thinking, looking down to this red-blue freestone palmed at the end of her arm.

“Wouldn’t you like one for yourself?” she asks, and tosses it.

Henry catches the plum and bites it securely in his front teeth. Unaffected by the harsh taste of first fruit, he boots the gate closed behind him, stepping over a loose rock and onto the dirt road. He throws her the best lighthearted wave he can while burdened under a full sack. And he is off to Bianca like that, meandering, with sour blood rolling purple down his chin.

 

 

 

That night, Theresa is at the dance.

It is cool and close and the sweet pine fire they light to keep warm burns with the wildness of being outdoors. Black air smells crisp with baked bread and full of stars. Tonight, Theresa does not wear ribbons; her hair is fine and will not hold but one or two. She slips instead a marigold into her belt, running fingertips over gentle petal fronds as she edges between shoulders and sits at tables and chatters with friends. It helps, she thinks, not knowing what. The smoke sparkles in her lungs with a promise of morning rain. This is not happiness, she thinks. Not quite. The heavy moon feels as though it is not quite close enough.

Henry is there, too, as promised, because of course he wouldn’t lie. He hasn’t even changed his clothes, and there are grass stains laid over green cloth, and Theresa’s clean dress under the dangling lanternlight looks suddenly too new. She watches them exist together with a hot mug of soft cider tenderly comforting her palms. Again and again, he pulls Bianca by the arm, stealing her from work to dance—though she is half-distracted with customers, and he is terrible at it. Matthew talks at Theresa’s ear, but she cannot hear it. Fritz tosses them both one of his mum’s famous hot biscuits then plunks down to play cards, but she does not eat. She notices. They move jerkily, Bianca and her blacksmith’s boy, in harmony that looks like cat-and-mouse. He grabs for the strap of her apron and she slaps him away; he links their elbows and she untangles; finally, he laces his fingers with hers and wheedles her away from the overgrown tavern path, so they may dance in the nettles under the sapling lime.

He’s clumsy, Hal is. He tires quickly, and spends more time twirling his girl than minding his feet. But it only seems to make Bianca happier, for he can’t keep up—he is farmland, and she is riverwater. She is half-spinning, half-pouring, filling the unfilled cups and teasing and cackling, wide teeth and a mess of curls browner than the night is dark. She is beautiful like that. She is always beautiful, but tonight, she is between worlds. It is beyond beautiful, eclipsing the bonfire and the red paper lamps and the starlings in the willows and the endlessness of sky over flat land. She is everywhere and tilting wine and happiness. She moves like Christ. It is not Christian, to see holiness in hands and moles and the smell of plum juice mixed with beer and the feathering of marigolds, but there is all at once nothing more Christian, Theresa thinks; she thinks no earthly moment has ever been closer to God than the deep water of Bianca’s eyes blinking away tears when she stumbles on pebbles and laughs.

She does not daub them away. They gather swiftly in creases and plunge down the cheeks, glistening her lashes; she shakes Henry’s hand from a hip, drops his limp wristbone. Then her arm is lifting, and the pointer extends, the copper-red flake of gemstone she wears upon it more precious than rubies or blood.

Theresa does not even notice that finger is pointing at her—not until she speaks, a voice surprising and strong like magpie wings above running water.

She says: “Hal, go and dance with Theresa. Look at her hovering over there with those two louts, like a shy little pony. She’s bored to tears!”

“No, no! No more dancing. I’m too tired,” Henry groans. “I can’t,” he puffs. “I’ll die,” protests the blacksmith’s boy—not because it’s true—but because the only one he wants to dance with is Bianca. And who, having glimpsed Christ in a woman, could blame him for that.

“I’ll not have any of it! You’re a big strong boy; find the will. Quit pestering me and go dance with her!”

Theresa feels her insides slipping all into her heels. She feels perilous, like rockslide. “Oh, no—no,” she insists, fine hairs on end, backpedaling. Fritz and Matthew tease, but she is not aware of them at all. She leaves her honeyed cider at the table and withdraws toward the protection of an older crowd. “No, that’s fine, Hal. I don’t even like to.”

“Look! See, now. She says she doesn’t like to.”

“Get gone, both of you! I’ve never seen two people so frightened of living. Well, if that’s the way you want it, here you are. You pour—” Bianca orders; and she thrusts the lukewarm pitcher into Henry’s rough hands; and she is swishing forward over packed dirt like a crimson flag in still, spring air. “—and I’ll dance.”

So she does, Bianca. She snatches Theresa by the hands, ignores her slip-slide begging, and tows her into the cool shin-high grass, out into the dark beyond the hanging lanterns. And they dance there, gripping hands tight and whirling like little girls. And so they are again, for an instant. For a time. Bianca is eleven and Theresa is ten and they have long skinny legs and unashamed gates and pealing laughs and briars stuck on-purpose, like bee-fairies in their hair. And they are not in the market—or in the town—or in the plot outside the tradehouse getting bug bites on their shins. They are waterside with Theresa’s wet hair and Bianca’s black eyes like winter earth beneath old snow.

 

* * *

 

 _Are you afraid?_ she asks, letting Theresa tip-toe desperately on her feet as they stand, face-to-face, in the deep river. Sunlight fishscales around her eyes and throat. Bianca is head-and-shoulders above her, and the smaller girl puffs out her cheeks and tilts her head back and sputters pathetically—what smaller girls, body and soul, do.

_I can’t swim. Of course I’m afraid._

_You can!_ Bianca laughs, steadying Theresa’s ribs, shutting her eyes just in time to avoid an accidental spray. _You’ve already got it. You’re just so frightened, is what it is._

_I’ve got water up my nose! You’re letting me slip!_

_Here_ , she says, and tangles them, and grips tighter than anything had before. _Hold onto my hands._

The current, when she finally leans forwards into it, lifts Theresa up. Bianca does not let go—only once, to raise the swimmer’s stomach higher when she begins to sink—and as one bed of fingers corrects her belly, the other hand holds tighter still. Theresa’s tattered dress spreads around her, wrinkling like drowned angel wings, Bianca’s reds like blood beneath it—and though the water floods her mouth and nose and throat, it does not burn. A child cannot remember her baptism. But it must be like this, she thinks, weightless in the dark with unseen life flitting around her. It must be like the hands around her own.

Bianca steps away, holding tight, and lets Theresa swim.

 

 

 

In plum season, they dance. The fire smolders through a night, and in the morning it does not rain.

 

* * *

 

The wheat burns.

They come to the mill under sunlight. Milosh is carrying seed to the shed and sees them first. They are glinting steel helms on shod horse hooves, and they are on leather boots in the front yard, and Milosh is screaming as she’s never heard in dreams, and they are past the well, and they are upon the door. Georgei bellows run, Theresa. He shoves her halfway out an open window facing the eastern river, running water straight to Rovna. Theresa, he says, I love you; Theresa, he says, run; do not come back. But she does look back. She looks, and they are clubbing off the door hinges, and Georgei takes an axe against them, but it catches on the frame. They cut her brother’s head off. She falls outside, away from it, and now she cannot see the eyes in his face or their shared nose or where one part of him ends too suddenly and where the separated part begins. She cannot see at all, somehow, though she feels the plum summer sun here upon her arms. Theresa runs, but not far. They are here, too; their hands bird’s-foot into her hair, upon her wrist, around her ankles. They pull backwards and her feet are slipping and her breath is knocked out and beneath her chest the millyard grass is yellow-green and warm and smells of good soil. They rape her. They rape Milosh, and cut off his head.

The sunlight feels cold on her neck, now, and now in the shadow of Hell Theresa sees her head roll, a red sigh watering the anthills and dandelions. She watches the mouth relax around her teeth and an unnamed light leave her eyes.

But the shadow passes, and there is raw unblinking sun.

It is not the teeth in her let-go head. It is not her head, at all, flung out before her in the thirsty grass. It’s her hand, clawed; they’ve let it go. She gropes back and finds the belt of the man trying to press her into the earth, and she finds a pommel there. It comes loose. Theresa pulls the long knife, pivots it inward, and pushes it steadily into the delicate, fatty flesh beneath his lowest rib. 

There is a stopping. He does not seem to realize the dagger is inside him. She holds on tight, and in an instant there’s more space, all at once; Theresa breathes deep; she tears air into herself; she rolls, and she puts the sharp point into his navel two, five, eight more times. She loses count as red slicks her hand and leaves him there to finish dying. She does not remember anything about his face but the surprise.

Her brothers are no longer here.

They are upon the church now. She does not look for anything else. Theresa stands up, and in a headwind, she is not here anymore, either.

 

 

 

She runs only as far as the mine. She goes as far as it takes to find Jarik—to see her little brother dead in a washbed of silver, his face turned into the gentle water, thinning his blood plum-pink.

Uphill, black smoke roils off the tavern in Skalitz. She touches her stomach and there is ruin there, too.

 

 

 

The river to Rovna is deep and clear.

Overnight, it rains. Water snuffs the burning of the town and poisons the air with a murderous reek of charcoal and horseflesh and mud. Theresa walks beneath a starless night in the grass sea, plodding through thunder, and it is cold. But this is only her skin, she thinks. Her blood is slowing, browning the remains of her day dress, and the weather has washed her red hands and face. It is not enough. She is thirsty; her insides are dust; and though she turns her mouth toward the sky, it does not help. It cannot reach. There are embers in her belly and her outside stops the world from getting in.

The river is colder.

Theresa’s feet are swollen in her ratty boots and it seems unthinkable to take them off, so she doesn’t. Water seeps immediately through suede as if she has no shell. It sweeps the filthy skirt from her knees. Thigh-deep, she thinks about stripping her dress, but leaves it; there are no people to see her. The gate into Skalitz has slumped back and she cannot go through it. She supposes she will not see anyone again.

She steps off, and it is deep.

The river is dark with the night. She tries to pull that darkness into herself, closing her eyes because it makes no difference open or shut, feeling the current tumble her slowly back toward Skalitz. The water will put out the burning. It will smolder everything back into soil, scattering them like eensy silver fish. She tilts her neck towards the silt floor and fills up her lungs, waiting. She tries to breathe the river in.

She tries to sink. But she cannot. You cannot unlearn how to swim.

Theresa chokes. She cannot help it. Her mind goes silent and her body refuses the river, purging the water; it breaks free and gropes for the reeds of the bank, coughing up darkness; her hands clutch long grass, shivering, half-above and half-under. She chokes and chokes and everything from the old world comes out.

She will not burn in Hell. She is white dust, made thick in water. She has gone elsewhere on the air.

 

* * *

 

In the end, it does not matter, their language. It does not matter what the color of their hair or eyes or teeth. It does not matter if they are Wenceslas’s or Sigismund’s or if there is no flag for them to fly, at all. They are all the same.

They come for Henry, then. It is two dawns after; the burning has cindered; what was red has gone gray; and she is walking up a ghost road toward some where else when she hears the breaking of his voice echo in the rain.

They are the same thing, too.

She picks up a rock and walks through the black gate into town.

Henry’s blood is garnet-red running down his face in the rain. She can hardly see him past the color. But he is there, and they are going to kill him with steel. They can’t, though. She knows this. In that moment, she tastes the river on the back of her tongue, and she squeezes her rock, and she knows the future; like she knows God, she knows it will not be. She remembers the exact pressure and shape of hands around hers. She thinks she could touch Bianca if she were to put her finger past his bleeding lip and reach deep enough.

Theresa looks down her stormwet sleeve to the stone in her fist and realizes that no, she is not frightened. She can never be frightened again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CHAPTER TWO WARNINGS** : Mild blood, alcohol abuse, sexual content, animal death. Maybe some feather-light mouth horror if you’re highly affected by such things. Again, nothing super graphic, but please do mind the general tags for specifics.
> 
>  **ART!!!!** : Nilryth did me [a Henry based on this chapter](http://cuntdestroyer5000.tumblr.com/image/172451094886) and I am crying. Please go scream compliments [in her general direction](http://cuntdestroyer5000.tumblr.com/).

When he is small, he drinks a grail of holy water. He pulls it from the altar behind the baptismal priest’s back and he swallows it down.

The divine elixir does its trick. He bleeds for a week—a slow ebbing of evil from between the baby teeth, cherry red below the tongue. The glass-eyed family priest watches the child spit jasper onto white stone floors and has no explanation. His father calls a bigger priest. This one is old and oaky and attempts to extract a confession; _why did you do such a thing,_ he asks, walloping his black-eared bible as the boy grins pink. No child of five years knows why he does anything. So, for lack of truth, the priest guesses. He says it is possible for a demon to infest the womb, if a woman has lusty dreams or a melancholic heart; it is possible, he says, that the fiend has been nested inside him all along, a black curl of scale in the stomach; it is possible one taste of blesséd water killed it, and the surviving child bleeds out a little leftover Hell. His mother calls a physician, instead.

The physician has a much less cosmological interpretation. He lectures that baptism water—holy though it may be—is also often full of mold. He scoffs that too many priests let their divine elixir sour in the communal font. He gives the boy an acrid and leafy paste to chew before every meal and instructs his mother to squeeze his dimples, make him stick out his tongue to prove it. Quite mundane, actually, he hums. He guarantees the bleeding will stop when the heat settles and the mold clears. He says no, of course, your little lord is not cursed.

The boy swallows. The blood stops. But his mouth tastes like the forest forever after, and the fever never comes down.

Hot blood and holy water—what explanation for everything.

 

* * *

 

When he is a bigger child, Father takes him hunting. That is only halfway true; Bernard takes him hunting; Father reads literature and drinks red wine at their lodge, the untouchable world at the center of a lazy pack of men and horses and dogs that swirl always around him, jostling to impress. Little Lord Capon climbs a tree with his little yew bow and weeps with the frustration of learning the real chase of the nobleman's Hunt has nothing to do with animals. He looks into his father's armor and sees his own face in the silver shine.

It is Bernard who takes pity. The captain lifts the lad and his dashed dreams out of the juniper tree, and leads him into proper forest, where deadly berries and bloody briars grow. There, he teaches young Sir Hans a breathing trick to steady his bow—one no tutor will ever show him, not then at ten years and not later at twenty-five. The boy misses shot-after-shot, hawk feathers popping into dry leaves. When an arrow finally lands, it is Bernard who applauds him, and Bernard who sends him to sniff down his kill.

It is Bernard who waits, too, for little Lord Capon to return. It’s Bernard who will teach him to pelt the carcass. And so it’s Bernard he thinks he’s angry at, at first—when Hans finds the dead hare, foaming helplessly at the mouth and trickling blood though its buckteeth, his arrowhead lodged between its delicate ribs. He is flushed with the blackness of having killed something that would otherwise still be alive. His head pounds as he crouches among the thistle, and the rushing beneath his skin is perilously hot. He hates Bernard, he’s sure. He tries to pull the arrow out, but snaps the shaft; his palms sweat as they smooth down the eruption of fur around the iron. He thinks he will die if he has nothing to drink.

The thimble of watered ale in his wineskin does nothing. He will have to drink revenge, instead.

It is Bernard who looks for him when he does not return, but runs, hiding as deep in the woods as a boy of ten can dare. The captain, who is then only a young man himself, calls with increasing panic— _Master Capon_ splinters quickly into high-pitched, dreadful _Hans_ —but the child will not come back. He flees until heat is burning beneath his fingernails, noisy feet over parched twigs. The killed hare bleeds slowly into the boy’s arm. When he can run no more, he climbs into the velvety dark of a hollow owl tree, smelling the richness of its death; he cools his lungs; he looks for some way to dig low.

The rooty soil is no good for digging. His damp gloves land in a heap. In bare hands, animal fur is still soft, long after the body has gone cold.

The garrison dogs find him at dusk, when the forest is a tender, threatening red. Nobles and soldiers stumble in the distance, calling for their lord’s son. But they are far away and the alaunts do not bark them here—not yet—and none of them are Father—and young Sir Hans feels badly enough for himself now not to spurn these earnest wet muzzles. He resigns from the trunk. Paws are dancing around him immediately, black forms with sharp friendly teeth. He wraps his arms around a slobbery hound’s neck and gives up the hare.

The dog takes the gift without thinking, then drops without elegance. It's a hunting animal; boots and whistles have taught it better than to eat a fresh kill. Its brothers bay their victory, loping back toward the nobles' camp, but this slower pup is paralyzed with the dilemma. The untouched hare flops before its claws.

 _Go on,_ Hans eggs. His throat is tight with the thought of Bernard’s knife slipping under brown pelt, and doggish obedience provokes in him a snapping contempt, even then. But a dog is only what you make it, he knows; he knows it does as it is allowed to do; he knows you cannot ask a dog to be anything apart from what it is. _You can have it,_ he pleads, willing the animal to trust him. Go on _,_ he says. He says _None of it was your fault, after all._

The dog drools nervously, gently mouthing the forbidden snack. Its haunches quiver in indecision. On a final whine, it capitulates—looks shame-faced at him—and then it bites open and wolfs everything down.

When the men arrive, there is no prey. The soil is darker; the hound is guiltily licking its chops.

And so the hunt here ends. The sport is over, and the quarry is found; the play-hunters will return to their camp and drink and toast and divide their honors instead of meat. They will carry him back, these nobles with their horses and servants and dogs. They will return him to Bernard, who will even now be riding miserably along the treeline, voice cracking on his young master’s name, weeping with the fear he has lost him for good. They will say worry not, Captain; little Lord Capon is here. They will clean him up nicely. They will take him home.

Before they do, the boy presses his hand into the spot of slick earth, gaining red fingers. In secret, he finds that everyone’s blood tastes the same.

 

* * *

 

He is a fast runner. He lives as quick as the river, and no one can keep up.

 

* * *

 

When he is fourteen, red-blond and long-boned, Mother miscarries for the third time, and Father freezes to them. In the space of a season, he calcifies like shed antlers. He becomes morbid and gaunt.

Mother endures much, but cannot endure all. Every morning mass, as dawn wakes the green glass of their family chapel, her husband insists upon naming dead babes. He makes her recount their exact moments of death. He suspects to their servants that she has been ridding herself of them. He looks, rarely, upon his firstborn, for he resents the features that look back—they are her family’s, this tall brow and foxish snout, these pink knuckles and eyes of gray—his people are black-maned and broad. _Your boy,_ Father broods, eating his flatcakes with knife alone, _is a sinner._ He was cursed from the start. He tore you open. He does not come when he is called.

If Father has become bone, Mother becomes rock, harder and unforgiving. She cannot flee into the woods like a boy can, nor can she run until the heat from her lungs clouds the thin spring air. So she must withstand. She names her dropped almost-children. She feels dark jackal ears twitching to catch her confessions. She obliges Father’s temper, ignores his coolness, and at breakfast she stiffens her throat and chews slowly. In private, she throws pitchers at walls and shatters her handmirror on a Pirkstein fire.

 _That man,_ she curses, crossing her heart with the silver handle left behind. _That devil in a man’s skin. Hell take him._ _I hate him._

 _I hate him,_ Hans pledges, hurling his own cup of wine into the flame even though his tongue is fire and his mouth is dry, aligning his petty rebel flag with hers. _I hate him, too._

She says he is your father; you cannot.

It does not go like the boy thinks it will. There is no ultima tempestas that smashes the dam down; Father does not break her jaw, and Mother does not poison his berry jam. It is more like a floodplain that gathers until it can hold no more water, and everything seeps. For his part, he knows only that one morning in an April fog, hitched into a covered cart and led by a train of fleabitten blue roans, Mother retreats for her ancestral estate in Polná. When she takes his hands to say so, Hans wails and weeps into her lap like a much smaller child, begging her to take him with her. Mother weeps her fair share, too, but she does not. _Rattay is your right and yours alone,_ she swears. _It is in your blood,_ she insists.

Your home, she tells him, is here.

In his home, after Mother has left for good, he lives in fear that Father will summon him. One evening, Hans is sure, he will call his one-and-only heir into a bleak oil-lit study; or he will catch him sneaking late outside his chambers, smelling of grass and spirits both liquid and mist; or he will have him marched into the main hall before a seating of courtiers and strike him in such a way that the handprint will never wash off. But he never does. Instead, it is Bernard who hunts for him—and, if he should not return, it is Bernard who will wonder sadly where his young master has gone.

 

 

 

He runs like a rivulet on window glass. He will last only as long as the storm.

He finds other boys, of course. The pack is the nature of lesser wolves. Young Lord Capon has a trio of favorites—the chubby and short-toothed sons of middling nobles, who think of little and act upon less. They follow him like belligerent little rams, yipping and vying to curry favor their their future governor. He detests them all, obviously. He invites them hunting without license. He loses them on purpose. They are not the same kind of animal he is.

They cannot run as fast or drink as deep. They are shy of cliffsides and dense thorns and black water. They will not dare to beat him in a fight. Their parents, who are worse, encourage them, as though mothers and fathers have any power over who survives in Hans Capon’s company and who does not. He wishes sometimes with the daydream meanness of unloved boys that these people would lie down in the wolf runs and die.

He tests the spine of their loyalty. He tells each they are his real favorite. He kindles tiny lies like candleflames, enough to sting fingers but not to catch the loft afire. For dogs do not understand that men revile nothing more than stupid devotion; that there is nothing less deserving of hatred than politeness; that there is no sin blacker than false feeling. They would do near anything to amuse him. Boredom turns him lazily wicked, and he wonders if they would murder each other, given enough cloying, if he asked in just the right way. He has them compete. He orders them to steal treasures from each other’s families. He makes them hit one another with sticks, then with swords. He cajoles them to kiss to see what will happen—and when nothing does, his disappointment in divine wrath is plain. He asks them unanswerable questions. He leads them to the white falls in the middle of a flood season and orders his wolves to leap over—and this, finally, none of them do—they will not, they swear! they will not do it!—no one would risk dying like that—no one would shatter his heart for a breath of cold water beneath cold air.

 _Drown, then,_ Hans says—and because no one else will, he jumps on his own.

 

                                         

 

The great joke of the Hunt is its ending. For all diversions and delusions that must be started have, too, a close—a point that separates the realness of nature from the lives of men who live in castles, a star that reveals their chase again-and-again for the sad play-game it is. Even a forest is incomplete wildness, for it has a definite edge, beyond which the two-legged hunters lose their sharp teeth. The little lord who washes ashore must always take himself home.

He returns from the white falls in the early evening, unhurt, boiling hot and soaked through. There, under the cool shade of Rattay Castle’s archways, is Father. Hans is not afraid of him; he has baptized himself in savageness. He is twenty years of age, not a full man but a child, neither. So he strides on long legs before the lord who begat him, interrupting Bernard’s courtyard report, and the captain’s face blanches dismay at seeing the heir waltz in so bedraggled. There is calmness as there is only in a painting of nature. Father blinks coal-dark eyes placidly upon him. His dog-boys cower. His heart has caught fire beneath the shallow woody bone of his chest.

I, the boy says, hate you. _I hate you,_ he whispers, a susur like a cat’s tail through wild leaves. _I would have rather been a shepherd. I would have rather been a girl. I would have rather died in that priest’s arms than to walk in this world as your son._

 _Then live,_ his father says, _forever_.

 

 

 

He grows quickly. He sheds his fawn spots. His wisdom teeth surface too early, and as he sleeps, they fill his mouth with slow, warm blood.

 

* * *

 

He chases larger game. Elk, boar, lynx. He hunts alone and to kill. He learns the darkest quarters of the forest in his body and in his dreams.

He abandons his dog-boys. Instead, he finds women—whores, whose advice he covets, and whose listless honesty he admires.

He drinks like a desert. Foreign wines, beer and honey. He drinks and drinks until the blurriness of the world makes him feel somehow sharper. Fats melt from him like ice; his insides are yellow sand.

He goes where he goes too fast. Over rapids, among sharp stones. He runs horses to madness and fury in the hills beyond his home, under wind and thunder, feeling stark and naked and unkillable among threatening air. He runs with furious denial of cliffs and stones. He runs until he forgets which way will bring him back. He runs until his horse revolts, bellowing injustice—and throws him easily into air—and dashes him like a fish upon the ground.

And it is only there, upon the ground, he forgets the taste of holy water. The impact wrecks him. His back seizes; his self spasms; his helpless bootheels paw earth; his arms contract to his ribs. The heat in his blood peals into shocked silence. His skeleton trembles, shaking with the promise of pain yet to come, unable to understand it but knowing it hovers on the cusp of something terrible, something only an animal provably alive can feel.

He convulses on the cold green grass until the pain runs through him, screaming into cold gray rain.

His curse survives.

His father dies.

 

* * *

 

It is Bernard who finds him. The young lord is out hunting nightbirds, and when he returns to Rattay in a thin pink dawn, hounds loping behind his grulla mare, his father’s captain is there, waiting with the black news. At first, Hans staccatos into laughter, nervous and dreadful. Bernard squeezes his shoulders so hard he is shocked into confused, reflexive tears. The captain carries his catch of wings home.

It was a chambermaid who discovered the corpse. Father appeared to have risen from bed to poke at his fireplace and dropped cold.

It is Hanush who comes to execute his estates. Hans is twenty-four and burning with the indolent ignorance of the over-educated. He knows nothing about governance, it’s true, and when his uncle arrives by caravan with a fleet of coin-counters and scribes, young Lord Capon is as embarrassed as he is relieved.

It is Bernard who finds him lying in the cellar, half-stripped against cobblestone in desperation for cold, a badly-cracked keg of the household's best wine dripping on the floor.

It is Mother who has the burial robe made in Sasau. It is inlaid with silver birds and black stitches. She has a black shirt made for Hans, too. But she does not come to Rattay—and so, on the morning of the internment, she is not there. Lord Capon—for he is the only Lord Capon now—feels his head whirl with heat and his throat suffer. He watches them ease the coffin into dark, loose earth.

It is Bernard who finds him saddling his horse behind the churchyard after Father is entombed. As the mourners drift back toward castle hill for a final ceremony, Hans embarks on a sloppy and abrupt escape. The captain calls _Sir Hans_. _Sir Hans,_ he calls again, louder, cupping his mouth as his lord’s son defiantly steps into the stirrup and mounts. _Sir. This isn’t what you want, lad. Come on back with me,_ he hopes, futile. He says _Come home._

It is Kazimir and Elena who wake him from beneath the old beech tree, where he has been sleeping all day. The escaped young lord has drunk his drink too quickly and fallen asleep in the forest. Dogbreath and worried whining roust him before dusk. He feels desiccated. He wishes he could be like them and drink from the wild stream.

It is Bernard who finds him swilling spirits in the alehouse two days later, ragged from woods and inexplicably black-eyed, losing Jan Ješek's sword and a small fortune to swindling rough boys. It is Bernard who frightens the villains off, who bullies back the sword, and who pays the innkeep for silence. It is Bernard, too, who sends him to wash off the dirt.

It is Nightingale who sits him up from the blood poppies growing outside their bailey church at two-in-the-morning. The guardsman helps Lord Capon to his feet as diplomatically as possible, steadying his rightful governor, walking slow paces back to the keep. _My good man,_ the young lord praises him, pleasant enough in his cups though his hot heart aches like it is full of sawdust. _Your concern is precious,_ he says, _and I could use it. I could. If you wouldn’t mind. I could really use something to drink._

And it is Nightingale who answers, gently, _Perhaps it was too much to drink already, Sir Hans._

It is Bernard who finds him lost in the lime orchard on a harvest moon.

It is Bernard who finds him sick and sleeping in cold bathwater.

It is Bernard who finds him in the bowyer’s bed.

It is Hanush who slaps his face—hard! horror! he has never been slapped before!—and tells him, _You need saving, boy. Kurva! You need God._

It is his uncle’s priest who teaches him how to pray for his father’s soul.

 

 

 

The order of Rattay changes. Hanush moves into Father’s rooms. He brings a castleful of his own servants, courtiers, scholars, and other quill-scribblers. The dead lord’s retinue retreats to his son’s court down the sloping road. Hans needs not move, at all; he has always slept in Pirkstein, draping fevered arms through his window for want of a cold breeze, watching the painted animals of his childhood bleed into terror on the walls.

It is a dark chase, this. He wishes black stags and white hounds and red lions would stop their strange hunt through his dreams.

After Father dies, Hans finds he can sleep among these hungry shapes less and less. In fact, he cannot sleep at all without the soma of wine. He prays as the priest taught him, but it is no use. He crosses his heart and kneels before Christ. He pinches his stinging eyes and bounds into the forest, where the old gods live, but they will not mercy him, either; he is caught between two heavens now; holy masters do not suffer boys with split minds.

It is, of course, Bernard who suggests he speak to an apothecary. The apothecary suggests pumpkin flesh and lavender cooked into milk. Hans will not drink milk. It does nothing to cool his thirst.

 _“Can you believe such hogwash,”_ Lord Capon asks that evening, laughing, dropping his hands into the wooden tub with a disastrous splash. “They want me to shovel pig mash for fear of a little drink!”

It is Zdena who turns water into wine.

The bathhouse maids do not charge Lord Capon any money; they salt his water and pour his drinks and soap his hair for goodwill. He is well-behaved and doesn’t hurt anyone. He brings them presents: imported claret, candies, silk scarves, rich cheeses, pelts. They listen to his problems and let him fuck them and perfume his clothes. They give excellent advice. They are not really his friends, of course; they can’t be; but they are something close like it, and he is fond enough of them to think they are the next-best thing.

He knows them all quite well by now. Kachna, who runs things, has all the freckles and all the business sense. Surgeon Anna is handy with stitches both linen and skin, and so big-hearted she cries whenever you so much as _ouch_. Marta is the tickler. Klara, the prettiest, won’t whore, but she is fun to drink with and does adorable magic tricks with vanishing coins and handfuls of cotton. Zdena is his favorite—because she is smarter than the others, black-eyed and sarcastic, and she cheats at dice. She gives sharper wisdom; she has a lower voice; she does not like to be teased or splashed or any of that fuss-around playmate pretense. She drinks without drunkenness and is more relaxed.

She’s a Jew, Zdena tells him that day. It is scarce weeks after his father died—she relays her story with frank words, on a whim—and he leans his head into her lathered hands and listens. She was once apprenticed, she tells him. She tells him how she was trained in medicine and tonics; how, after they chased her parents out of town with pitchforks and fire, she grew to womanhood in a pearl string of hutches above Pribyslavitz, learning from herb women and cutting her own wood. She tells him how, one day, soldiers from Talmberg came and burnt her mistress at the stake for witchcraft. She tells him about having no arrows and being hungry for meat. She tells him that a man who to this very day calls himself an apothecary stole all that witch’s bottled potions for his pretty city shop.

"I think you’re wonderful _,"_ he tells her, drunkenly half-serious, but it isn’t a lie. “You’re the smartest person I know. You should run Rattay. You should be my advisor. I should be your advisor. You should have been me, and I,” he swears, tilting up the last of his pitcher, swallowing for liquid that is not there then dropping the empty vessel into the tiny sea. “Should have been pouring your wine.”

She sneers, unimpressed, and dusts crushed lavender into his bath.

 _It’s not fair, you know,_ Hans laments later, lolling his head back between her breasts as Zdena sits nude behind him in the steaming water and, businesslike, scrubs a rough sponge at one set of his fingernails. “None of it is.”

She is not a spiteful person, but he can sense her rolling eyes. “That your father’s captain—out of care—hopes you’ll drink less?”

“No, that isn’t it.” He sinks an inch farther down the flat bone of her chest, letting hot water house his pout. “Give me a little credit, witch-Jew.”

“From where shall I draw this credit? You could drink less by half and still be a sorry lush.”

“It’s everything else. That I should be left all this,” he confesses, “after everything.” Zdena releases his finished hand and reaches around for the partner, but Hans extracts it, needing someone to witness more than he needs clean nails. His lifelines go pink and his fair hair goes browner and his eyes, bloodshot, go murkier gray. In water, he is no hotter than the space surrounding him; he can wash the taste of woods out of his mouth. “That there was no flood. No locusts, no fire. That God didn’t strike a one of us. That he would just—just die.”

It just isn’t, he swears. That sort of judgement just isn’t fair.

Zdena does not answer right away. When she sighs, he can feel the breath revolve in her lungs, and turns his ear to catch the last of it. Veins of her dark hair stick to the fragile skin between his cheek and her breast. Outside, the sky darkens and a low wind shushes willow eaves. Even in here, bracketed by fire _—_ even under expert care _—_ even with him in it _—_ the bath will quickly go cold.

“I have a rabbi’s mind and a witch’s education,” Zdena tells him. Her words in the night are prophecy, or something almost as-good-as. She scratches her fingers fondly along his scalp. “And I am here wilting in a bathtub with a spoilt-drunk lord. What’s fair, my dear?”

“Blood,” he says. Hans finds the castaway pitcher scuttled in their bath. He studies it, ceramic pimpled with motes of grape, then plunges the vessel back in. And he fills it to the brim with tepid water, and he drinks deep.

Zdena is alarmed by this horsing, and thumps him, making the new lord choke. Sudsy wine slops over as Hans snorts bubbles; he is laughing. As she climbs out, annoyed, to grab for her shift and fetch more real drink, he lifts his offering high like an altar chalice and dumps the whole thing over his own head.

 _Blood!_ he cries triumphantly _—_ drinking and laughing—and then only laughing, because he cannot drink and breathe at once.

 _Blood,_ says he. _And holy water._

* * *

 

Devilry, they say, is catching. They say if you are not careful, you will find the talons on your back.

He does not think of himself as a danger. Boredom is dangerous; poison is dangerous; fire is dangerous. If he has killing claws, they belong to the smaller variety of bird. He does not think of himself as birdlike, either.

The huntsman, who is always losing birds, tells him one morning that hawks take exception to the color red. This is why, he explains, a smart farmer will fly red flags over their chickens and hares. A hawk is accustomed to blood, of course; it cannot be afraid of its own work. Yet there is something about the bright reminder of dying that shames them back into the trees.

 _Who is that blind boy,_ Hans wonders of Bernard at the archery range, resting his bow upon his thigh to pour a cup of wine, not needing to point. The archer misses his target every shot and there must be something wrong with his eyes, Hans thinks, to be so terrible. _With the red scarf?_

Bernard tells him the boy’s name, though Hans is not really listening for names. He watches the arc of the overshot until it zips into drying tallgrass, stolen by nettles that grow along the castle wall. It fills him with disquiet, unsettles his heart. Incompetence should not anger Lord Capon so. Incompetence is frustrating, but innocent; this is something less sharp. Insistence, perhaps. Perhaps it is the fresh minor memory of his rudeness to Bernard, who deserves respect, even though Hans does not at all care for respect. Any excuse is reason-enough, yet still he finds he cannot tell the what or why, only that it’s true, it is _—_ there is something about the scarf that makes him feel vicious.

There is a dull whoof of packed straw as Henry’s shot finally punctures the outermost ring. It slumps there sadly, askew. But it is there, and so is the ring of red around the blacksmith’s neck.

Bernard asks him not to be cruel. He reminds him of Uncle Hanush and Nobleman's Stature and What Happened in Skalitz and his More Important Duties. But some cruelty, birds and boys alike know, is necessary; it is in nature; and in such cases, there is nothing more unnatural than looking away.

Hans sets down his drink, raises his bow, and _—_ holding his breath through a mouthful of sour red _—_ aims a single bull’s-eye at a target, not his own.

He swallows, and lets the arrow fly.

 

* * *

 

Dogs, they say, have a godly sense of things. They see the colors people cannot.

His dogs hate Henry. This is true of most dogs, it appears, though it is a mystery what he has done to offend them. Kazimir and Elena growl the blacksmith’s boy and his red scarf into a state of polite nervousness at the hunting camp—and, recognizing fear, so demand their share of meat before he-his. _You mustn’t wrong us,_ they insist to their master, staring. _We were yours first._

Hans tosses a full skillet of bacon into the bushes, acquiescing to their sense of order, where dogs eat before serfs do. They huff through the leaves long after the last bit of lard has been licked away.

He makes note of this bad blood later to Henry, for Lord Capon is merry enough to share mulled wine over fire. Hans suggests he must have committed some indelible travesty against dogdom in a past life, a notion Henry ambivalently points out is blasphemy, but he also does not disagree. _Maybe I was a cat,_ the blacksmith shrugs, a less brave and toothy reason. _Or maybe,_ Hans supposes, _you were a hare._

He does not always mean to be cruel. He knows keenly that an excess of heat can be a torturous, unhealthsome thing. But he would rather be cruel than not, because you must care to be cruel; you cannot be distant when you are cruel; you cannot loom, like smoke, like you can beyond the grave.

He leaves the blind boy behind on purpose, it’s true. When the hunt was new and the world was, too, the old gods willed it that some animals are made to walk and others run.

 

 

 

They kill his dogs with spears.

As it goes in the forest, so it goes in life. Elena scents her master’s blood on the brambles and leaps savagely for the nearest throat, mad with love. Kazimir sees his sister’s ribs separate around steel and retreats, but a long arm strikes him, too, and he lights off to die sobbing shame. They kill him, three, Hans thinks—for though he cannot see the blood, he can feel the syrupy heat of it lull down the inlet of his eye to his nose—and he bares his teeth, and he breathes in the livid green death that is the smell of woods—and as he loses consciousness, that smell and that heat play together in the gulley of his mouth—and dying, he is pleased to learn, is not special. It tastes like anyone’s dying would.

It is Bernard who finds him, dead on a pike like a yellow dog.

Except it isn’t, and he isn’t. Young Lord Capon wakes in a fog with a cut on his head and gloomy eyes and a sense of dragging. It’s not a pike jammed through his lung, but a pole fixed against his back; his hands are not chopped, they are tied; it is not dying, but sleep of a sort, the dreamless black that takes you only after you’ve seen or sustained a terrible thing. It isn’t Bernard, either.

It is difficult to make sense of what he sees, for everything is steeped in blotted cobwebs and treeshadow and there’s a dizzy stinging thrashed along his snout. He does not recognize the slope of earth under his boots. Yet he can feel the twitch of withers beneath his palms and remembers the smell of his gray mare; and he knows the correct way to grip a saddle, which he does; and he knows from the prickle of air on his face that the sun is drifting down.

 _Step up,_ someone is saying, he’s sure—but his boot has been placed in the stirrup all wrong, and though Hans cannot see much beyond embroidered leather and a first fistful of coarse black mane, he swats away the strange hands attempting to assist him. He steps up and swings over and the saddle creaks in a familiar way and there are breathing ribs between his knees.

_—ang on. There’s nothing to tie you in, so you’ll have to sit still. You won’t fall, will you?_

Someone is still talking to him, and now Lord Capon feels his temper crackle. Any fool could see he is in no way for conversation, and he is insulted by the suggestion of falling off his horse. He frowns hard to force definite form upon something—the saddle or the voice or the knuckles of his hands, battered—but it is no use. A pale face blinks up at him, unknowable and frustrating, bleeding into aspen bark and comfrey buds and this unnatural mist rising across the ground.

He paws for that face—perhaps to give it a piece of his mind, or to disturb the ghost, if that is what this is. But his talons miss, and there is red cloth rubbing between his fingers.

 _You,_ Hans remembers, and it is statement of fact, not astonishment, though what he says and how he says it are not the most reliable measures of how he feels. _You found me?_

“I found your horse,” Henry offers by way of explanation, though for all it is the truth it sounds contrary, as if this particular question annoys him—as if he has already been asked many times. The scarf is rough, and Hans holds on tight. “How many times are we to go through this, sir? You have a head wound. You shouldn’t tax it by talking.”

“How? How!” he laughs, wheezing, though it hurts in his skull. “You can’t hunt. You can’t fight. You don’t know anything.”

“Your horse. Sir.”

“You. _You_?”

The blacksmith sighs. There is a tug on the cloth still clutched in Hans’s fist, but he merely fists tighter; he does not let it go. “Sakra. This is fucking ridiculous.”

“You found me? How.”

He does not answer that time, which seems to Hans like the first. But Henry steps out of reach, pulling the red from his hand. And Hans does not know if he asks again, or if he merely thinks it—for in the future, it is always with the same dubious question mark he happens upon this _you?—_ not-quite distaste, not-quite wonder, but a surprise that still echoes like that first time, let loose without any sign of coming home.

The blind boy walks the horse and the lord back to Rattay, where Hans Capon will soon remember how to see lines again. He will remember his dogs’ names, and he will remember the silver face of the Cuman who killed them. He will remember roundabout where it was he had been set upon and the place he smacked his head. He will remember having been nightmarish and will wish, at least a little, he had been less-so.

He will not remember, head spinning in the bony moonlight on the dewy fields beyond the gates, adding the question: _Why?_

 _You made me so angry,_ Henry tells him. Then, before he can argue: _Angry is a lot better than being nothing, though._

Cruelty is better than nothing, too.

 

* * *

 

Jan Hus calls down across all Christiandom that the greed of powerful men will dash the world in blood.

Uncle is less prophetic. He harrumphs it is more likely they will burn Jan Hus at the stake. Hans has learned to watch him carefully at court, though he professes not to; he minds the rumble of Hanush’s voice when it issues aye or nay, the timing of his curses, and the way he waits for a clumsy ambitioner or duplicitous noble to trip himself up in his own snare.

 _And if you don’t learn your fucking lesson,_ Uncle warns him, punctuating his wisdom with a fat fist against the dining table, as though God could be stopped by a sound. _They’d just as gleefully burn you, too, my boy. If they can ever catch you out of your bathwater._

At night—when the bathhouse has closed its doors and all the maids are sleeping— Lord Capon will pull himself out of the steam, ill with heat. He will be too hot to lie in a corner bed with a woman. He will fling his wine out the window and drink river water. And, like an animal of the sea, he will stretch naked across cold stone to shed his skin and cool his blood.

 _They’ll burn your whores and riffraff, too,_ Uncle warns him.

Zdena wakes only enough to reach down from the bed and hold onto his hand.

There are worse fates than fire.

 

* * *

 

When he is small, teachers teach him. There are a thousand things a boy, if he is fated to be a lord, must learn.

Henry doesn’t know things, and there are no teachers for fatherless sons, so Hans must do the role, instead. Henry does not shoot well; Hans shows him all the tricks. Henry does not catch the fine details of swordplay; Hans demonstrates proper arming and footwork, slowed-down. Henry does not read, so Hans learns how to teach letters, and once he’s learned it, he teaches Henry to write his own name. Hans then teaches him how to write his name, too.

 _Why do I have to do all of this?_ Henry grouses, thumping his palm heel against his heavy brow, stabbing his quill petulantly into a well of ink.

They began this long passing-down of letters in Father’s study, which ceased to be Father’s Study when Father died; now it was just The Study, and serving little function besides the collection of dust, since Uncle was scarcely literate. Hans dissected the shelves book-by-book, hunting for something Henry might be able to read. He would pull one down and hold it aloft, calling out titles and laughing at rejections. _The Rule of St. Benedict I!_ he’d announce, waiting for Henry to hiss and boo, chucking it listlessly onto the heavy table with the rest. _Ah, and here: Benedict II! Liturgy, liturgy! On the Papal Schism! Evil Morals in Bohemia! Hellfire, contrition, damnation!_

Some servant must have spoiled their fun, because one afternoon, Hans and the blacksmith walked in to find Lord Hanush sitting comfortably over Ovid with a squinting smile and a mug of mead. They do not read in Father’s Study anymore.

Now they practice in a pasture with books balanced on their crossed laps like poor itinerant monks. Grasshoppers bother them instead of castle staff and wine skins do not keep cool very long. Sun through shade trees pimples the paper, and pimples Henry’s face as he pours over his page. Hans, if he looks closely, can see the eyes moving to-and-fro beneath lid and lash; he checks often to be sure his pupil is not dozing in the grass.

“I’m educating you, thankless bugger. And you had better mind your lessons,” the young lord warns, merrily punching the bottom of Henry’s book to upset his place in line. “Rudiments first, and then you’re on to real Latin. Say: _Audere est facere!_ Say: _Per angusta ad augusta!_ ”

Henry rolls his whole face into his hands and groans. “Can’t you just let me go back to my simple lot as village idiot and pay some courtier’s son to entertain you?”

“What; you want me to entrust my reputation per procurationem and my very well-being to the silk-stockinged blue-bloods? To the _nobles_?” Hans scoffs, as if he does not belong to them; as though they are a farther class removed; as though it is a more ridiculous and far-fetched concept than speaking Latin to a blacksmith next to a field of beef cows, under a walnut tree. “They’re worse than you are. Absolutely, absurdly fucking useless. I have no need for useless attendants.”

“Can’t see why you need any attendants. You already know and do everything.”

It’s a joke, but it isn’t, and he ought to be flattered, but isn’t. Hans considers the distance between them and rushes to close it as quickly as he can.

“Look, here, Hal. You’re not a whole idiot, see?” He reaches over the top of his book to tap the page. “You even wrote the little-e facing the right direction this time. Let’s have it once more.”

 _All this,_ Henry complains, _because you don’t have any friends._

Hans pokes at the parchment. Write it again, he says.

 

 

 

Henry is afraid of his horse, so when the summer sunshowers allow it and when Hanush is not attentive enough to disallow it, Hans drags him into the emerald hills outside Rattay, pulling the dappled gelding by its bit and pulling the blacksmith along just as insistently. He teaches him how to hang a bridle, how to lay a saddle blanket without tickling the horse, never to wrap the reins around his wrists. He teaches him how to step into the stirrup and how to sit forward up a slope. He teaches him how to hold his knees so his boots will not heel the animal’s ribs, and in these endeavors, he leads Henry in circles like a father forcing a skittish little boy to learn how to ride.

He announces as much. “You look like a page,” Hans informs him, which does not seem to bother Henry at all. Such things never do.

“Really, sir? I’d think I look rather more like a lord. The home-bound knight, brought back ‘round to the keep astride my mighty stallion.” He pauses. His shoulders are comically stiff and his red scarf does not hide the nervous flexing of his neck. “That makes you my page.”

Ha-ha, Hans snaps without humor, lending him a little more rope every pass. “You do realize Bernard’s given you a glue horse. Also: that’s a gelding, not a stallion.”

“I’m not a knight, either,” Henry notes, incidentally. His fists squeeze the saddlehorn tight.

That’s not all there is to lordship, of course. Hans teaches him how to fold a caparison and how to fall gently out of a saddle, should he ever be shot there. He teaches him how to fix a thrown shoe and crafty ways to catch a runaway on foot. He urges him to loose his horse and then call it quickly back to him, explaining that a companion is only a companion so long as they return, and that there’s always a compelling reason to run. Henry seems to understand. For he drops the rope, watches the dapple wander, and then—when it is far enough away—he cups his mouth with his hands.

Pebbles, he calls.

Hans erupts—a flinty, mean whinny that makes the horse startle. Henry’s voice cracks lamely in the way of people not accustomed to yelling, and he affords the laughing lord a sheepish look. Said lord has already propped his hands on his knees to recover, howling, and he can feel the dimples digging into his face.

“What, then! You told me to,” Henry fobs, embarrassed, pointing that tsking old farmer’s finger-shake of his, which makes Hans laugh harder. He laughs an ache into his belly, and then his knees are twisting sideways, and he spins himself to a slow seat in the dry wave of flowering grass. The blacksmith’s boy stubbornly wills into oblivion his pink ears. “You’re going to fall over giggling, you’re doing it at yourself. Go on. Roll, then. Hog. Buffoon.”

“Pebbles! You don’t call a horse like a dog, you silly bastard. Is that what you named it? _Pebbles_!”

Hans exhales loudly for breath, sitting in the tender green fieldgrass with an elbow hanging on a cap and himself hurting happily. He waits until the pain recedes, and without standing, slips crooked fingers into his mouth; his whistle is sharp and clear.

Pebbles trots back as Henry looks quizzically at his own fingers a moment before mimicking. But nothing comes—just a pathetic, toothless hiss riding a fine spray of spit—one that strikes Lord Capon down again with laughter.

“Sweet Jesus Christ,” he blasphemes, pinching tears out of his eyes, blinking the salt away. “You can’t whistle, Henry? I’m teaching you the finer points of dueling and livery, and you can’t _whistle_ , for Christ’s sake?”

The shrug he gives is insolence itself in how unabashed he is by not-knowing; and his smile is childish enough to be sly. _You’re a fool, Hal,_ Hans tells him—often, and with incontestable adoration—for he is a fool, too, of a different species but of the same family, and at once with very different families. He might have been like that, he thinks, if he had only been born a little colder and a little darker; a little calmer and little softer; a little slower, with a father who cared so plainly enough that he could be worth loving as simple and unwild as he is.

He teaches him how to sit and post and _yah!_ and cluck. He teaches him how to breathe when he runs and what to say to a lawman and the best way to Ledetchko in the night. He even teaches him a bit of Latin. By the time they are halfway through, the blacksmith is hardly a blacksmith anymore; he even says so; he says, rolling his eyes as Hans bosses him around a hunting camp, " _You can’t call me ‘blacksmith’ when it’s been three-fourths a year since I’ve made so much as a nail_."

 _"You’re still all blacksmith where it counts,"_ Hans protests.

_"Where is that, sir?"_

It is not a complimentary tone, and he expects Lord Capon will point to his own head, giving a thick thump-thump in suggestion of sheet metal. He thumps his chest instead.

For all that, Henry never learns how to whistle—try as he might, his only birdsong is a cool hush of wind through his teeth.

 

 

 

 _You’re just like me,_ Hans makes him swear, over and over, like he cannot remember the time before. _Say that you are._

 _Well, not just,_ Henry rebels, only a little.

 _You’re my friend, Henry,_ Hans demands. _We’re best of friends; we really are._

 _You’re not my best,_ Henry jokes, and Hans doesn’t care whether it’s true or not.

 _And if they burn Rattay to the ground,_ Hans avers, not giving Them a name, not caring if it is Sigismund or Vicar Hasenburg or a score of hellhounds with torches carried between their teeth. _If they smash through the gates and light up the castle and scorch everyone—and if there I am, smoked out with a butter knife behind the last fucking door in the world—you’ll be there to fight them off with me, won’t you? Won’t you._

Henry guesses. _If you burn, I burn, I suppose_.

 

* * *

 

Hans asks him snappily one morning as they ride onto the north road under the promise of storm: _Will you drown?_

The sky is heavy with darkness. It moves like something alive, with bear jowls and a growling belly. Henry would have liked to delay, but what Henry would like stands no chance of stopping Lord Capon from slapping the reins and setting off with a scrappy _hyah!_ at a canter. _You see_ , he barks, shouting over the rip of wind that rakes them hair-and-jackets towards the blackest clouds, and then towards the babble of creekwater, and then towards the distant woods. Hans slows only enough to let Henry’s glue horse close the distance. He holds his hand up and turns it flippantly as though to point out the very air. _This will carry all that east! It’s just a little water._

The storm does not veer east, as the young lord guaranteed it would. It does not clear to give him or his condolences safe passage to Zora’s stud farm. The hair stands up on his back like a cat and the air tingles with brimstone so hungry and menacing he tastes the color green. By the time he admits danger, they are too far from Rattay to retreat home; they feel large and meaty on flat, immense land; as rain falls, first in cold fat welts and then in buoyant milletseeds of ice, Henry worries correctly that Neuhof is far away, too.

The first shudder of thunder spooks the horses. They second spooks the riders, and under witchfingers of lightning they break for the cover of river trees. Their animals need no encouragement; hooves cleave ruinous, galloping prints into farmland, and though Hans hits the treeline first, it is only by seconds. They drop into the copse, egos punished. Scattered rain speckles dead leaves under their boots; their horses, breathing heavy without riders, fjord deeper. The closely-threaded hornbeams shield them from most of the hail.

 _I told you, I told you,_ Henry scolds, crashing into the shelter of spruces and baby’s-breath behind him. He is livid, soaked through the scarf to the bone, and his voice cracks to life with anger, and his eyes are bigger in fear of water than they have ever been. _Didn’t I tell you we were in for it? Didn’t I say?_

It’s true; he did. Except he has never seemed so pathetic and glorious than he does there, wronged by the storm. His doe lashes stick and his brow is drenched and his very teeth are wet and his blood beats quick enough to see it in his throat. And Hans is away like a jackrabbit; he grabs the blacksmith’s ears meanly and he kisses his mouth, biting through the bottom lip until his own tongue jumps for joy in red; he pulls in color selfishly, and theirs tastes exactly the same, there’s no difference at all; killing light spiderwebs over the trees above them and he whines happiness through his nose like a cur; he has never been so elated in his life.

Henry slaps him like a woman would—like an aghast old maid—and looks about as offended, as speechless. Blood mingles with stormwater on his chin and seems more fatal than it really is. Hal looks at it spread on his fingers like he just can’t find words for the grand _I-never!_ he’s about to launch; his palm lands mindlessly over his heart; he’s so utterly disobliged that he doesn’t speak, at all. And Hans can take only one instant of that affronted carp face before he cannot help it. He laughs. He wraps his arms around his sides and throws his head back and lurches forward and laughs until breathing hurts. Until he can either breathe or laugh, and he chooses laughing. The blacksmith blurs into gray sky and skinny red trees, leaves darkgreen with wet and smelling of wild earth, big white eyes and badly-cut hair. He laughs through the water running down his face and dripping from his nose. Hans laughs even until he loses the taste of blood on his mouth to the taste of rain.

Then he kisses him again, kindly. He kisses the breach of his mouth; the upper lip, gone cold from rainwater; the bevel where his bitten lip slopes to chin. The blood is still there and so the hurt, too, and Henry winces against the kisses where it stings. But he does not turn away. Instead, close enough that Hans catches the flight of words right into his breath, Hal says, bizarrely, _It’s raining._

And he shouldn’t stand here and smirk, but what use; there is no other future in his cards. He devotes one thumb to Henry’s cheekbone as a heavy raindrop makes the blacksmith flinch, catching his eyelash, making Hans's heart fill up his mouth; and with his free hand, he squeezes a fistful of sodden scarf. Red dye lingers on his handprint for days. He dares: _And will you drown?_

Hal doesn’t even take the time to think about it, or how clever it was. _Yes,_ he vows, and does.

 

 

 

Henry’s fingers are frigid in every sense fingers can be, threatening to disprove what they say about smith's hands, but a little guidance uncurls and tucks them under Hans’s shirt, where they put up a satisfyingly icy fight against his hot stomach. He is feather-light at first the way you aren’t supposed to touch a horse. But the shirt is shed easily enough, and Hans drops gold brocade onto the damp earth, wrecking it. He stands in his raw skin in the woods goosepimpled but living and he is certain he will never be killed.

The hand on his ribs gently brushes away water. Henry wonders, “Aren’t you cold?”

 _Never,_ he says. Never.

 

* * *

 

He takes him. That is to say nothing about the configuration of bodies, save for the truth that the indelible lines of the body are all that separates one from everything. That is to say he becomes a branch of his life, in a sense, like an organ; adopts him; picks him out and takes a certain responsibility; or a bond; or a sacrament, made to let those unscrambled borders of the body bleed and run. He wants to remind him exactly who he is with, whose name he knows how to write. He grabs at Hal's scalp so his mind does not wander. He pins his knees tightly into Hal's sides so he doesn’t think of his miller’s daughter; and so he does not call for his lost love, bites him. Blunt teeth do not break shoulder skin but his sweat tastes the same as his blood in cold rain, only stronger. He touches Hal’s throat to feel the unfledged language when it is at its greenest,  when it is yet unborn—before it hits the mouth and slips the tongue—to make sure it will be  _his_ name, just that and in full, he cries for when he comes, and it is, just that, and in full.

The storm leaves them stripped and religious. They stay behind in a friendly, gray calm as the last of morning rumbles away, and they lie placidly side-by-side like a couple of pagans, watching clouds pass to the nearly-still quiet of tree leaves pattering water. They do not speak—that is, until Hans sits up casually, dirt and old petals crushed along one whole half-length of him, mud slicking the back of his hair. He snorts at Henry and says, “I think you need a bath.”

The stream through the bosk smells fast-flowing and new. Their horses drink knees-deep, and their castaway clothes are disastrous. Henry sits, too, head lolling lazily forward, sullenly picking shed bark from his gambeson. He still wears dried blood on his lip. “You’re a loon.”

“Better soaked than soiled,” Hans resolves merrily, knowing they’ve not much choice. He reaches over and slaps the blacksmith’s thigh, making him jump in a way that is irrationally delightful. “Don’t worry. If you drown, I’ll chuck your effects in after you. Water-burial. Maybe you’ll even make your way to the sea.”

Hal acquiesces on a sigh. But not before his right paw grabs Hans playfully by the dimples, ruining his grin. He means it: “Don’t you fucking bite me, though!”

 _I won’t, I won’t, I swear,_ he promises, mushed grin surviving yet, triumph beyond triumph, glee above all glee that has ever come before. He receives a dubious look before Henry releases his cheeks. Hans offers as proof guarantees of softer things and pledges to behave. He pleads, _Let me wash your hair._

The water is swollen and cold from the storm. It does not feel so to him—not truly, not a cold that blues the mouth and sinks through the meat, changing you. But under the wine-dark current, Hal brushes his leg, and it’s windy; he shivers.

 

* * *

 

Fire is drawn to the woods. This is the order of life.

Forests, for all they are chaotic and untended things, thrive upon newness. A million lives all reaching for sunlight at once cannot cull themselves. Nature must challenge the old patterns, so, when in crisis, it sends heat. Space is made. Beautiful flowers and animals die. Burning is not gentle medicine, but what one needs to live is not, sometimes.

And it’s true—it’s the ultimate truth of his life, guarded closely like candlelight in a storm. Truth, as in knowledge, is powerful; sometimes as joy, sometimes as weapon, sometimes as supreme disappointment. But even if the apple destroys you, it is still just as sweet and just as red.

The truth is: Holy water doesn’t taste like anything. It is as clear and natural as the rain.

Zdena laughs magnificently when Hans tells her Hanush’s warning. She has seen fire, and she knows its shape and price, what it does to a body and to the old splintering trees. _“Burn us all, God save us! Feed for the pyre. You, young lord—you and your whores,”_ she parrots, enjoying it. She walks easily among steam, turning like a dancer on her bootheel with arms full of rosemary and a pitcher of wine, making him think of witches spinning around flame in the night. Her laughter is like tinder. “ _Your whores,”_ she cries. “ _Your whores, and your riffraff, and you!”_

 _Commit us,_ howls the witch, _to the fire!_

Fire is nature, too.

 _Ego sum ignis_ , he says, and pours his drink out on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hans's development arc is continued in [IN SPRING](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16179545).


	3. Chapter 3

Henry wakes up in Skalitz.

It is afternoon, cloudless summer, and he has overslept. Mother mercifully left this morning’s porridge over embers, imbuing the house with a wheaty, blackberry sweetness. Outdoors, the sounds of Father shaping metal punctuate arguments of larks in the linden tree. He will be angry at Henry for slumbering away so much daylight, but his family loves him very much.

Henry rolls out of bed. He splashes his face and eats oats with soft cheese. When he is full, he steps outside onto the thin scraggly grass, then feeds his lungs with field breeze and charcoal smoke and the smell of grapevines braided sluggishly up Mother’s garden posts behind their home. The castle is comfortably silent uphill. Downhill, the town meanders easily through its lunch. It is all lakewater sky, a still blue, and for some peculiar reason, he cannot remember it ever being another color. It feels like everything is always happening for the first and thousandth time.

He helps his father build a sword. Sir Radzig arrives later to inspect it; he compliments Henry’s handiwork and his oversized dreams, knowing they are only dreams, as gossamer and as golden-pink. They all three watch Mother walk to market with a basket that will soon be full of yellow fruit and flowers. Everyone lives well for a very long time.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. It was supposed to have been a beautiful day, but stormclouds have rambled in early, and drenched them. It rains steadily for a week without any sign of abatement. Father must delay the smithing of Radzig's sword. Dances and outdoor markets are cancelled. When the green-gray clouds finally clear, a hunter finds many strange hoofprints in the outlying fields, churning spring clover into half-mooned mud. It looks like an army has met bad weather, and turned away.

This is, everyone agrees, an outlandish proposition. The hunter is scolded for kindling such upsetting rumors, and the mess is attributed to roaming cattle from Rovna. By autumn, mud turns to grass, and Radzig's sword is finished; nothing more ever happens, and no one thinks of it again.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. That afternoon, as he and Father begin their lord's blade, a breathless scout barges into the castle to inform Sir Radzig that Sigismund’s Cuman raiders have sacked Merhojed. It’s terrible, and everyone spends the next several months watching the horizon with nervous, bated breath. The crown has turned its head elsewhere. Nothing befalls them.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. Wenceslas is a robust and righteous king, and no one would think of usurping him.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. He is the only and legitimate son of Lord Radzig Kobyla—which means this land and those who live upon it will one day be his to keep. Next spring, he is engaged to be wed to Lady Sophie of Talmberg. But those who care to notice such things say young Sir Henry spends far less of his time in Castle Talmberg and far more of his time running horses too fast in the woods beyond Rattay.

He is away when the Cumans arrive. His father, who is very proud of him and has only just commissioned Henry a beautiful blade, writes that the battle was indeed terrible—but by the grace of God, no one of import was killed. Unbelievably, the town blacksmith has even managed to salvage the sword. He will bring it, he promises, to Rattay.

Henry does not care about a God-damned sword. He would like to ride immediately to Talmberg with a complement of soldiers and meet his father—indeed, he straps in plate armor under midnight thunder to do it—but Hans chases him like a furious wild thing out into Pirkstein’s courtyard. _What the hell do you think you’re doing, you fucking donkey?_ he shouts up at Henry’s horse in the rain, sleeping tunic soaked, boots splashing and slouching unbuckled. He grabs for the reins when yelling doesn’t stop him alone, and the stallion groans in fear, too. _It’s raining an ocean out here,_ Hans shouts, arms waving furiously in the dark, seeing only by the fierce light of his eyes _. You’ll be struck. You’ll get lost._

He says: You’ll drown.

Like a promise, the wind worsens. Henry goes back inside, where Hans convinces him to wait out the storm.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. He did not stay out late bandying or dancing or wooing Bianca beneath the lime trees, and so rises early. His chores are done before noontime; he is a good boy. Mother has her hands full tending chickens, so with a kiss and a basket, he runs to market and buys stew vegetables in her stead.

He is killed quickly when Sigismund invades. A horseman cuts him down outside the tavern, and there was nothing anyone could do. His parents both survive, and will one day return to Skalitz, where they rebuild their home together. They daily lay presents of marigolds and pretzels upon his cross beneath the linden tree, and when they die, they join him there.

A fine family moves in and raises children in Mother’s garden. In time, everyone forgets. The turtledoves nesting in the branches are all glorious and new.

 

* * *

 

Henrika wakes up in Skalitz. She is betrothed to young guardsman Janek, a fair swordsman and a good man. When the pillage begins, he and Father charge the market, where—in a combination of miracle and luck and skill—they are able to rescue mother and daughter as the colored canvases burn. Father is nearly killed, but Janek is just fast enough to save his life, and so theirs, too. They lose everything else.

But none of that matters, Father swears, shivering in the night rain as they trudge to Rattay, roping all three of them in with his long arms. We can make a new home, he tells them. As long as we’ve life to do it.

They do. Father secures Janek and Henrika both gainful employment at Pirkstein, and they are quite giddy together; Sir Radzig grossly overpays her to mind his chambers; they never want for food or money. Yet there are moments she feels a soft disquiet, like catsfeet across pond fog. Henrika sees the Lord of Skalitz looking at her despairingly when he thinks she does not notice. He seems too interested in her health and her husband— _Does he treat you well, that boy?_ he asks her as she brings him his breakfast; _Does he bully you?_ he asks; he asks _Are you happy?_ —and she is never sure how to safely tell him she is. There is even one morning, after her belly’s thick with child, that Radzig all but snatches a heavy load of laundry from Henrika’s arms, eyes fraught with some terrible wonder, like he is suffering on the verge of saying something momentous but never does.

 _You needn’t think on Sir Radzig,_ Mother assures when she frets, steaming a bucket of hot water for her sore feet. Henrika is uncertain—mentions that the other maids have remarked on it, too _—_ but her mother merely smiles. Gently, ruefully, like a friend in-on the secret. _He is quite indebted to your father, you know. He’d want nothing but happiness for you._

 _I’ll take that,_ Radzig insists, removing plates and pitchers, pressing clean coins into her palm. He says _Sit a while and be comfortable._ He says _I don’t want you to have to do anything more._

She names her son Martin—after her father—who loves his family more selflessly than any man in the world.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. His father, who is not only a blacksmith but an expert combat master from the Legion of Prague, has trained him in swordplay since he was old enough to lift a wooden sparring blade. When the army comes, Markvart von Aulitz is no match for them.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. He was shot with an arrow yesterday, skulking far in the thickets beyond with Matthew and Fritz, planning some minor mischief upon the Deutsch. It skewered his lung with barbed iron. While searching for the stray bandits who did this senseless evil to their poor boy, a scout discovers a militia camp, instead; he sends runners immediately to Talmberg; Lord Divish dispatches Sir Robard with a full complement of his own spearmen, and platoons of armored horsemen are en route from Rattay. Sigismund fades back into the woods.

He wakes again and again. There is no sense of time or dreams.

Matthias, a sprinter, leaves quickly to fetch the surgeon from Rovna. Johanka drops her weaving and comes running straight to the blacksmith’s house up the hill. She washes the wound, changes his bandages, and gently dabs the blood from his mouth. She tells Bianca she can’t be sure. He can see from her eyes that she is only being kind.

Matthew insists he’ll be fine in another few days, once they yank that arrowhead out. Janek and Jaroslav stand at the foot of his bed listening to the bubbling noises and exchange darker looks. Fritz sits silently, explosively, on a stool in the far corner until he finally cannot bear it anymore—he cannot bear to see Henry like that—and barrels out of the house, leaving behind a basket of hot biscuits baked by his Ma.

Kunesh brings back Father’s hammer. Vanyek returns the groshen he’d paid for swordsmanship lessons with sheepish, unfamiliar honor. Deutsch even brings Mother a pitcher of fresh milk.

When the sun is low and time is short, Treesa and her brothers come to see him. It is evening now, and orange light slips behind the far forest. Georgei embraces Father like family in the doorway. Jarik cooks them a meal. Milosh says something inspired to Mother, but Henry cannot remember what. He only remembers the stitching on the back of Theresa’s dress as Bianca sobs soundlessly into her arms, and in that moment, he is so thankful for her.

Henry dies that night. Mother dozes wearily beside him, while Father and Bianca hold his hands.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. There is no silver here.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. Istvan Toth is a loyal friend, and would never betray Sir Radzig.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. It does not belong to Sir Radzig; it is the property of Sir Istvan; he is a bit of a snake, their lord, but his shrewdness keeps the town and the outlying mine secure. When Sigismund arrives, he pledges fealty without contest. The army extracts more than their fair share of silver, but Skalitz survives unburnt. Henry has no real use for politics, anyway. He works the forge with his father, and for the rest of their lives, they’ve little care about kings.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. The king’s ginger fox of a firstborn, Sigismund, was always the legal and worthier heir.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. King Charles IV is alive, and God decrees he should live forever. Peace, unbroken.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. There is no Sigismund or Wenceslas or Holy Roman Empire. They are only a gaggle of pagans drinking wine and raising dogs and dancing in the sweet hills under the stars.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz.

He is late to his labor, as usual. Mother rushes him out of bed half-dozing in last night’s grass-stained clothes. Father is displeased by this idleness, but they finish Sir Radzig’s sword; it is the finest work of his life. It will be Henry’s, too.

The Lord of Skalitz admires their craftsmanship. He praises Martin and declares Henry a fine young man, though perhaps a little softer than an old soldier’s boy is expected to be. _No child of mine has any use for soldiering_ , Father insists, and his bygone friend respects this decree. He respects so much, he will send the castle’s business to Henry for the rest of his life, though he is a markedly inferior artisan; when Radzig dies, childless, he leaves the smith’s family a permanent land deed and leaves Henry his beautiful silver sword.

There is no note. The perplexed bailiff asks, “Was His Lordship fond of you?” _My father,_ Henry mumbles, breathless, holding the blade in his hands and ignoring the trunk of groshen on his kitchen floor. _My father was his friend._

It is a strangely cool June, the year they make Radzig’s sword. A handful of cattle wander off into oblivion and Theresa’s infamous plum tree produces suspiciously edible fruit. In July, feeling strangely like the world could suddenly change as easily as a blackbird on the wind, Henry asks Bianca to marry him. Mother and Johanka embroider her a fine gown (her own poor mother is not alive to do it), then Father Francis officiates them come the first dark cherries of August. Pa cries at the ceremony. Ma teases him, but only a little, and Henry moves into his wife’s house behind the tavern, where the air smells of honey and where marigolds grow in the yard. He brings one to his mother every morning as he walks uphill to the forge. He brings his father a pitcher of cool ale.

Later, as the trees bronze and the best of boar hunting is on, news comes that some pretty young lord is killed in the woods beyond Rattay. They pull his body off a Cuman pike, and Henry is in a black mood for days for reasons he cannot understand.

Winter comes, unusually warm. He sloshes playfully in the snow, kicking some into Bianca’s way as they stroll arm-in-arm through the market to buy bread. She is pregnant, and their combined incomes have allowed her to hire a few farmland maids as wenches; this new status as brewmistress-general inspires Henry to ooh _witch_. Bianca pours cold drinks over his head. They have children. Many more winters come and go; they all feel mild.

Jan Hus is burned. Sigismund is crowned. None of it touches Skalitz. War passes them, takes only talk, leaves rock and fragile bird’s nests behind.

Henry and Bianca raise four children all-in-all; a few others do not survive the womb. They grow them strong and leggy in the blacksmith’s house under the linden tree, where their father chatters to his parents’ resting cross in the dawn hours before lighting up his forge. He asks Father for patience and a steady hand. He asks Mother for nothing; she has done enough for him in life; just luck, he suggests, and winks toward her garden, where his eldest daughter has planted lavender and pumpkins beside the grapes. Just a little luck should keep me now.

One spring, Bianca falls ill, and dies. Henry is brokenhearted. His eldest is twenty-two and looking for love; he would not begrudge her that, no; he kisses her brown hair as her mother used to do, and bids her keep gentle care over her heart. His youngest is six and does not understand much, but his father keeps him full of soup and biscuits and always under gentle care, too.

Henry tends well to his children; he is no useless body in the house. But his soul is weak for a long time, his laughter sounds like sighs, and the chair at his fireside is empty. It is only Theresa who comprehends the close incompleteness of his loss. Her brothers have gone away—Georgei to his grave, Milosh with Jarik elsewhere—and their left-behind sister runs the old mill quite alone. She makes work for Henry’s daughter (Bianca’s daughter), and bakes plum pies for his (her) three boys. Perhaps she sees echoes of herself and her own family in them; perhaps she sees mostly her lost friend’s black eyes. Whichever it is, Henry is thankful—endless, sweet gratitude. In the summer dances, Treesa takes his hand. _Let’s dance,_ she swears. _For her._

Years pass. Henry proposes to marry Theresa, but she laughs him off like it’s the most ridiculous notion. _I’m not in love with you, you batty old goat!_ she cries, wiping tears. _Neither me with you,_ he protests, tickled, _so what’s the harm?_ All the same, they gray together, waving boisterously from the mill with its sour plums to the forge beneath the linden tree. He tells her: _You are my best friend in the world._ Until we leave it, she agrees.

Like this, he grows old.

His children find families and livelihoods. His youngest son loves Theresa as a mother and she, who has no children, pledges him the mill. His middle two build scaffolds with Matthew’s boys in the mines. His eldest daughter and her husband now live in the high hill house and work Father’s forge. They take good care of Old Henry. They make sure he is comfortable, and that his loneliness is never too lonely to smile.

Now, in these delicate days, when his hair is snowed-over wheat and his sharp eyes turn slowly dim, all is dreaming. He’s nothing to worry over but eating enough and making his grandchildren toys. He’s taught them all he knew. He has loved them very much.

And, one day, as unremarkably beautiful as any other day, he leaves Skalitz. It is a still blue sky, and when sleep comes, it feels more like a first summer dream.

 

* * *

 

Henry wakes up in Skalitz. _You’re alive,_ Theresa cries—and though it all hurts—though life is wet road and unlit stone and warwind and the taste of cinder in his mouth—and though his head bleeds and his sword is taken and every thing with it is gone away—he is. Her cold hands banish the blood and the rain and the dirt and the ash from his eyes. _Wake up, Hal,_ she insists. _Don’t sleep,_ she tells him. She says _Don’t die._

Don’t leave, she whispers. He wants to promise: he never will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henry's development arc is continued in [WITHOUT HOME.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17880452)


End file.
